Copyright (c) 1996 by the Slavic Research Center( English / Japanese
) All rights reserved.

Ulus of Juchi 1240-1560s

Juji died even before his father Chingis, so the bequeathal passed
(in left and right wings) to Juji's sons Orda and Batu. After rampages
through the southern principalities of Rus beginning in 1223, conquest
of Rus (1237-40), and a foray into Europe from the Hungarian plain,
Batu withdrew his rightwing forces in 1242 back to the "wild steppe"
between the Dnieper and the Altai.
*28 His dominant half of the ulus eventually set up a
winter base at Sarai (1250s) on the Volga River. During the 1260s
hierarchical ties to the Mongol "metropole" -- by then transferred from
Karakorum (on the Orkhon River) to Khanbalik or Peking -- became a
formality, and Juji's descendants set about incorporating other steppe
peoples and exercising suzerainty over the principalities of Rus to the
north.

Batu did not directly occupy or garrison Rus. None of the Rus
principalities (subdued in a mere three years) could compare in wealth
to Persia or China. *29
Most of Rus lay amid timberland and bog, its towns being clearings
separated by thick forests and swamps (reclaimed land was ploughed).
But south of the forests was the forested steppe, and farther south lay
the pure grasslands, drained by great rivers -- territory ideal for
nomads, who moved up and down the river systems according to the
season. In other words, Batu's ulus did not reside in a land with an
ancient and highly developed settled civilization, but in the Pontic
and Caspian steppe. One of Batu's successors, Berke, imported skilled
artisans from Byzantium and Egypt, while another, Uzbeg, adopted Islam
(in the fourteenth century). Partly under the influence of Islam, a new
capital, also called Sarai, was built (1330s) with palaces, mosques,
caravansaries, baths, and a "bureaucracy." *30 But everyone
outside Sarai still roamed.

When Tamerlane of Transoxania sacked and destroyed New Sarai in the
1390s, the documents burned, so that what we know of Batu's ulus and
its relations with sedentary peoples comes largely from archaeological
evidence, numismatics, and foreign commentators, especially the Russian
chronicles. And among the most striking aspects of the Russian
treatment of Juji's ulus has been the designation of its inhabitants as
"Tatars." Were the Mongols Tatars? What lies behind this term?

First it is necessary to clarify the origins of the name "Mongol,"
about which opinions differ. According to Chinese annals, this was the
name of Chingis Khan's tribe. But Isaac J. Schmidt, a
nineteenth-century Moravian missionary who learned the Mongol language,
argued that because Chingis Khan brought together different tribes, he
had adopted the term Mongol to impart a sense of unity. Schmidt added
that the etymology of Mongol signified "brave, fearless, excellent," a
prideful appellation. A subsequent researcher, accepting Schmidt's
supposition, has slightly modified his reading of "Mongol" to mean the
"secure backbone" of Chingis Khan's power (i.e. his soldiers or
people). *31 Such
a reading, which seems plausible, betrays nineteenth- and
twentieth-century notions of how "states" are held together -- i.e., as
a "nation." The "Mongols" were everywhere far outnumbered by their
subjects (one researcher estimates the thirteenth-century "Mongol"
population at 700,000 -- at a time when Mongol-controlled China had at
least 75 million people *32).
Rather than a nation the Mongols were a ruling caste in the
broader ulus. The Chingisid principle was the "unifier," not
nationhood. Flowing out from the Chingisid principle was the military
organization of society, or, to put it another way, the convertibility
of civilian into military existence. That in turn was founded on a way
of life, nomadism.

The category of "Mongol" is further troubled by the evident
assimilation of Mongol speakers. According to one scholar, Batu
commanded 370,000 people, of whom maybe one-third were "Mongols." *33 Another scholar
acknowledges, however, that the number of Mongols proper remains a
mystery. *34
Indeed, the great Russian orientalist Vasilii Bartol'd emphasized that
the majority of Mongol speakers probably returned to the traditional
lands of Mongolia (for example, once Batu's European campaign was
halted in the 1240s). In addition, Bartol'd concluded, "those Mongols
who stayed behind in the conquered countries quickly lost their
nationality," as the language of the "empire" underwent Turkification
in the steppes and Central Asia.
*35 Logically, such assimilated Mongols might then merit
the designation "Tatar," which would seem to signify Turkified Mongols
as well as other long-ago Turkified peoples the Chingisid-led troops
incorporated. The Tatars proper were not Turks, however, but a tribe or
group of Tungusic tribes who lived in northeastern Mongolia and fought
incessantly with the Mongols (Chingis Khan's father appears to have
been ambushed and killed by a Tatar). The Mongols never called
themselves Tatars. It was the Chinese who used the name "Tatar" to
refer to all their northern neighbors, and it seems that the European
travelers to Mongol-ruled China, as well as Arab and Persian visitors,
adopted and spread the generic Chinese designation. *36 Note that the
term Tatar was rooted in an opposition -- the barbarians north of
China; the non-sedentary, nomadic peoples. It was in this oppositional
sense that the west Europeans and Russians adopted "Tatar." The term
Tatar, no less than "Mongol" or "Turk," expresses political relations.

An imposition that expressed fear and condescension, "Tatar" as a
name implied a sense of unity and cohesion within the Mongol realm.
Juji's ulus was never a unified or integrated entity, however. Rather,
it was made up of various semi-independent ulus led by Batu's brothers
and other relatives. *37
At no point did all the parts unequivocally recognize the superordinate
authority of Sarai, even if they sometimes stopped short of going to
war. By the second half of the thirteenth century, internal wars became
endemic. Tamerlane applied the coup de grace. Sometime thereafter, the
ulus "fragmented," meaning that even nominal allegiance to a single
khan ceased. This produced, in the east, various components independent
of Sarai (and the object of contention among Kirghiz and Uzbegs), and
in the west, several so-called "khanates" (Kazan, Astrakhan, and
Crimea), as well as other offshoots, among which was the Siberian
"khanate." The "fragments" had always been fragments; what changed was
the appearance, and to an extent the practice, of allegiance to a
single authority.

Exactly when Muscovy ceased paying tribute to the Mongol-Tatars
cannot be established, because the grand prince continued to collect it
from his own people and no chronicle ever mentions that the payments to
the ulus had stopped. Most analysts take the military date of 1480 (the
so-called Stand on the Ugra).
*38 Such a dating is entirely retrospective, as is the very
name of the entity from which Moscow would later declare itself
"liberated." In the 1370s the Russians did not call the inhabitants of
Kazan Tatars, but Kazanites. The inhabitants of Kazan became "Tatars"
in the course of Moscow's struggle to conquer them, following the
downfall of Sarai. Similarly, although some Russian chronicles of the
thirteenth century did occasionally refer to a "Horde" (orda), just as
often they wrote of Tataria. The use of the designation Horde became
more frequent by the end of the fourteenth century, yet it was not
definitively established until the so-called Kazan chronicle
(Kazanskaia istoriia) written after Ivan IV took Kazan. In that
sixteenth-century text we encounter for the first time the expression
Golden Horde (zlataia orda).
*39 During the "Golden Horde's" existence, it was named
variously in foreign sources and even in its own diplomatic
correspondence -- but never the Golden Horde. Sometimes the reference
would be to a specific ruler and his "Tatar" peoples. Sometimes the
designation Tatar would be used to indicate a geographic location, as
for example on extant Italian and Spanish maps of the fourteenth
century where we find "Tataria." (Marco Polo wrote only of the
"western" khan).

For a long time Russian sources wrote of the Tatars without
directly acknowledging their subordination. By a close reading of
extant sources, Charles Halperin has demonstrated that Muscovy and
other principalities were deeply familiar with Tatar politics and
society. Russian princes, nobles, clergy, and merchants visited often.
Russians rulers and clerics had to be expert in Chingisid dynastics as
a condition of their power. They invoked the Chingisid principle when
it was to their diplomatic advantage, and could not help but be
impressed by earlier Mongol success in forging an empire. The Russians
adapted many institutions, including the jam (postal network), tamga
(tribute system), kazna (financial or budgetary system), organization
of the field army, diplomatic etiquette and procedures, and
bureaucratic organization. But subordination to the Mongols had no
place in Muscovite ideology, which invoked Orthodoxy and autocracy,
both of which were traced back to Kievan Rus.

Halperin adds that "the Muscovite state, though it depended heavily
on institutions borrowed from the Tatars, did not come to resemble the
Mongol state." Russia remained Christian and agricultural. *40 At the same
time, however, Russia became multiconfessional. Muscovy had conquered
and acquired various "Russian" principalities, many of which long
retained specificities of their own (Novgorod, for example, kept its
own currency). But the taking of "Tatar" Kazan served as a turning
point, incorporating peoples professing faith in a powerful and
distinct religious tradition. This confrontation, between Orthodox
Christianity and Islam, provided Moscow an opportunity to articulate a
providential mission (most ambitiously expressed in the notion of the
Third Rome). It also enabled Moscow to turn the tables: among the more
important dimensions of Moscow's justification of its conquest of Kazan
was the assertion of its right of investiture of the khans -- the exact
reverse of Muscovy's relationship with the Golden Horde. *41 Eventually,
Moscow would admit the period of its own subordination. The phrase
"Tatar Yoke" (tatarskoe igo), however, does not appear before the
seventeenth century. *42
By then, references to "the Golden Horde" had become a means to glorify
Muscovite expansion.

Scholars have not been able to fix the "borders" of the Golden
Horde, or have done so only very vaguely using geographical information
supplied by Arab sources in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
(there is also a Chinese map from the fourteenth century). *43 On European maps
of Asia, various political entities are duly noted, but there is no
effort to indicate the "borders" separating them. Nonetheless, one
historical geographer has pressed forwward, noting that the Mongols
signed agreements with Riazan recognizing episcopal spheres and the
right to collect church duties (divided among the Sarai and Riazan
metropolitans), and that they seem to have maintained guards at some
kind of "border" with the Rus principalities. At the same time,
however, this scholar admits that many steppe peoples migrated, seeking
to create "neutral zones" between themselves and the Mongols, a process
the Mongols welcomed. *44
All of this suggests that the effort to establish the Golden Horde's
borders is anachronistic because they had no such concept. As Howorth
wrote, "among nomadic races, territorial provinces are not so well
recognized as tribal ones. A potentate distributes his clans, not his
acres, among his children. Each of these has of course its camping
ground, but the exact limits are not to be definitely measured." *45

Juji's ulus, notwithstanding its Islamicization, was less a state
with borders than a perpetual standing army, an agglomeration of
peoples for whom military and civilian life were not clearly
distinguished. There were notions of extremities and of lands that were
located beyond those that were conducive to pastoralism, but no fixed
state boundaries. The ulus was "nonbounded." Its rule, although
nominally exclusive, did not preclude multiple sovereignty (some
peoples levied by the Horde could wind up paying tribute to others).
There were intermediate zones of interaction, what in the case of the
American Indians has been called "middle ground." *46